Basr-Aha!

At the beginning of Wednesday's Nightly News story about violence in Iraq, a map of that country showed the city of "Basra". A minute later, during the same story, another map identified the city as "Basrah". Do we need any further evidence that the Nightly News producers just don't give a crap anymore? If so, there's this:

On Thursday's broadcast, Princeton University Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell was identified by an on-screen graphic as "Melissa Harris Lacewell" (without the hyphen). Perhaps if any of the Nightly News producers had bothered to check Prof. Harris-Lacewell's website (http://www.melissaharrislacewell.com/), they would have found the correct spelling of her name. The Nightly News producers are, without a doubt, the laziest producers in the entire news industry.

On the Aug. 21 Nightly News story about false rape charges made against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Karin Rosander is identified on-screen as being from the "Swedish Prosecuter's Office". The correct spelling is "prosecutor". (On a July 7 story about the U.S.-Russia spy swap, a Nightly News graphic identified Pat Rowan as a "Former Federal Porsecutor". Maybe one of these days they'll get it right.) The Nightly News producers really, really, really don't care.